Today, it’s easy to deride conservatives who say that Hollywood is run by “cultural Marxists” looking to poison the youth. But there was a brief period when pro-worker films were the norm and hundreds of talented filmmakers tried to subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) turn mass culture red.

The Devil and Miss Jones, a delightful screwball comedy in this spirit, came out in 1941, several years before the postwar anti-communist witch hunt and blacklist. Its stars are labor organizers trying to unionize a department

store. From the first scenes, unionizing is aligned with a conception of America as a nation based on revolutionary principles and the ideal of democracy. The department store owner, John P. Merrick, who’s also the richest man in the world and the titular “devil,” is furious when he’s reassured by his weaselly lawyers that the union drive is “a simple little disturbance that really has no significance.” He retorts, “The Boston Tea Party was a little disturbance!”